[armandososa]

WP is really extensible. The way hooks and filters work and the way they are used trough the codebase allows you to completely alter and change virtually every aspect of the software. That includes everything from the admin UI to the processing and displaying of content. None of the modern alternatives are remotely as powerful and versatile as WP is.

[mgkimsal]

if you're a developer, or have a development team, loads of options are even more extensible and versatile. and those options would all come with more flexible deployment, testing and scalability options.

if you're not big in to development, you're reliant on a plethora of plugins, and you need to hope that the dozens of plugins you tie together know how to play nicely together. I'd run in to multiple situations where poorly built plugins for plugins were hacked on and then conflicted with other plugins - everyone pointed the finger at someone else. and then the standard support line from a couple vendors (these were plugins with paid support, btw) - "disable 100% of all your plugins, then enable them one by one to see where the problem is". Sweet.

And when I tell people I inherited a wp site with just shy of 60 plugins, few people actually believe me. "I would never do that! I would never built anything with more than 4 (substitute with various numbers representing experience levels of people) plugins - that's all anyone ever needs!"

When it works well, it works well. When it doesn't, it's a bloody nightmare.

[52-6F-62]

Speaking from experience in nation-wide digital media— you're dead spot on.

I have seen sites with 60+ WP plugins enabled. Many outdated, many hacked upon (and poorly, with no documentation). Even the WP instances were modified just slightly and had convoluted build processes that nobody on the current teams could explain (again, with no documentation. Or rather documentation was "TBD" circa 2010).

And all of those WP instances either shared configurations and root style sheets or ran as a multi-site on a single machine with Nginx in front of it only using a mix of Akamai, Cloudflare, and Brightcove to handle some, but not all, non-print media.

The sites were consistently being exploited and having porn uploaded. Issues like that were usually caught quickly enough, but that kind of operation kept the teams busy with patching holes rather than improving performance.

Last I checked their WP sites downloaded 20 Mb of scripts alone on a fresh load, and 6mb thereafter.

Bloody nightmare is right.